C.R.S. § 39-37-102 — Legislative declaration

(1) The general assembly finds and declares that: (a) Colorado needs consistent and reliable funding from the state to sustain the services crime victims depend on, including wraparound services, housing assistance, legal advocacy, emergency shelter, long-term safe housing, case management, on-site crisis response, emergency financial assistance, counseling, and more; (b) Inconsistent and fluctuating funding hurts victim and survivor service providers alike. Many agencies are already working beyond their means to attempt to meet the growing needs of victims and survivors in their communities. (c) Over the last several years, agencies have made the difficult decision to downsize due to a lack of funding while, at the same time, more victims and survivors are seeking existing services and more complex levels of services; (d) Access to a firearm makes it five times more likely that a woman will die at the hands of an intimate partner. Every month, seventy women nationwide, on average, are shot and killed by an intimate partner. Over thirteen percent of women in America alive today, around twenty million women, have been threatened by an intimate partner using a firearm. In the United States, between 2014 and 2019, sixty percent of mass shooting events were found to be domestic violence attacks or to have been perpetrated by those with a history of domestic violence. (e) Additionally, individuals experiencing trauma due to gun and other types of violence, including military veterans and at-risk youth, need support to access mental health services in order to recover from their trauma and reclaim their health. Currently, there are significant barriers to access to mental health services in Colorado. (f) Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Colorado ranked in the bottom half of all states with regard to the prevalence of mental illness in the state relative to access to care. Since the pandemic began, the Colorado crisis services hotline has received thirty percent more calls and texts than in previous years, and the psychiatric emergency department at children's hospital in Colorado has treated ten percent more children experiencing thoughts of suicide. In 2021, one-third of Colorado youth reported experiencing feelings of sadness and hopelessness for a period of at least two weeks or more. (g) In Colorado, a gun suicide death occurs every thirteen hours. During an average year, six hundred seventy-seven people die by gun suicide and seventy-three percent of all gun deaths in Colorado are suicides. Colorado has the tenth highest rate of gun suicide in the United States. According to the United States department of veterans affairs, the veteran suicide rate in Colorado is significantly higher than both the national average and the national general population suicide rate. The Colorado board of veterans affairs has reported that current resources are inadequate to meet the needs of the nearly four hundred thousand veterans in Colorado, and Colorado is expected to experience a thirty-nine percent increase in service needs in the near future. (h) In Colorado, over half of all gun deaths among children and teens are suicides. According to the Colorado department of public health and environment, suicide is the leading cause of death for youth and young adults, persons aged ten to twenty-four years old. Black children and black teens are five times more likely than their white peers to die by gun. (i) The excise tax on the net taxable sales of firearms dealers, firearms manufacturers, and ammunition vendors for retail sales in this state is analogous to longstanding federal law, which has, since 1919, placed a ten to eleven percent excise tax on the sale of firearms and ammunition by manufacturers, producers, and importers; (j) Revenue from this federal excise tax has been used, since passage of the federal Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act in 1937, to fund wildlife conservation efforts that remediate the effects that firearms and ammunition have on wildlife populations through game hunting, particularly through grants to state wildlife agencies, and for conservation-related research, technical assistance, hunter safety, and hunter development; (k) This article 37 will similarly place a reasonable state surtax on firearm and ammunition industry members that profit from the sale of firearms and ammunition in order to generate sustained revenue for programs that are designed to remediate the devastating impacts of these products on families and communities across this state; (l) The National Rifle Association has referred to the federal excise tax scheme as a legislative model and friend of the hunter, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) has repeatedly emphasized the importance of this federal firearm industry excise tax as well. A 2019 statement by an NSSF director published on the NSSF's website emphasized that an often overlooked, and certainly under-communicated benefit, is the impact that excise taxes on firearms and ammunition have on conservation and wildlife populations, and a similar 2018 statement from NSSF praised Key Pittman and Willis Robertson, the legislators who sponsored the federal excise tax, as heroes of the most successful conservation model in the world. (m) This article 37 will similarly provide dedicated revenue to sustain and expand effective gun violence prevention, healing, and recovery programs for families and communities across Colorado, particularly in communities most disproportionately impacted by gun violence; (n) This article 37 is consistent with our nation's longstanding historical tradition of regulating commercial firearm and ammunition manufacturers and sellers, including through federal, state, and local taxes on this commercial activity. An 1883 California statute, for instance, directed local governments to provide for payment of all revenue assessed as a tax, or received for licenses, on the storage, manufacture, and sale of gunpowder and related products in order to fund a Fireman's Charitable Fund to support professionals tasked with remediating the collateral impacts of firearm-related commercial activity on public safety through fire risk. (o) In the historical record, other states, including Mississippi (1844), North Carolina (1857), Georgia (1866), Alabama (1867), the then-independent kingdom of Hawaii (1870), Nebraska (1895), Florida (1898), Wyoming (1899), and Virginia (1926), have similarly enacted longstanding commercial, occupational, or other taxes on those selling, purchasing, or possessing firearms and other dangerous weapons; (p) The tax proposed in this article 37 mirrors the federal excise tax on firearm and ammunition industry participants and is similarly dedicated to funding programs to remediate the direct costs to individuals and communities resulting from the accessibility of firearms and ammunition in this state. Source: L. 2024: Entire article added, (HB 24-1349), ch. 423, p. 2888, § 1, effective December 17 (see editor's note following the article 37 heading).